China Rethinks the Death Penalty

Hvistendahl, Mara, International New York Times

Outcry over wrongful convictions has challenged the legitimacy of
the judiciary.

Last month, China's Supreme People's Court overturned the death
sentence of a woman who brutally killed and dismembered her husband.
The landmark decision to send the high-profile case back to a
provincial court was yet another sign that the country's embrace of
the death penalty is loosening.

China is believed to execute more people each year than the rest
of the world combined, and 43-year-old Li Yan initially seemed a
likely candidate for death row. In 2010, she beat her husband to
death with an air gun, chopped him into pieces and boiled his body
parts. But police photos and a medical report backed up Ms. Li's
claims that her husband had abused her -- stubbing out cigarettes on
her body, banging her head against the wall and threatening her with
the air gun. The Supreme Court determined, rightly, that these
circumstances justified a retrial.

China is putting the brakes on the death penalty. According to
Liu Renwen, a legal scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, between 2007 and 2011 the annual number of executions in
China fell by half. Many violent offenders are now given so-called
suspended death sentences, which are invariably downgraded later to
life in prison. Such restraint has drawn broad public support.

How does a country that harvests and allegedly sells the organs
of executed prisoners begin to lean toward more humane alternatives
to the death penalty?

Like most of the world, China allowed the death penalty for much
of its history, along with an array of other harsh punishments that
included at various times servitude, tattooing and castration. But
beginning in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), Confucian scholars
emphasized a humanitarian approach to justice. The purpose of
punishment, they argued, was to morally rehabilitate offenders and
restore social harmony, not to secure revenge.

One crucial precept was chuli ruxing -- that only when gentler
means fail should punishment be used. While brutal executions
certainly occurred, for centuries emperors regularly intervened to
issue acts of da she, or great mercy, by pardoning offenders
entirely. Some went further. In the 8th century, Emperor Xuanzong
briefly abolished the death penalty, making China one of the few
feudal countries to do so.

By late imperial times, Chinese execution practices were moderate
compared with those in Europe. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911),
imperial edicts suggest that China largely avoided the carnival-
like killings then common in France, Germany and Britain. Public
executions were solemn, orderly events, with guards discouraging
rowdy spectators.

That changed drastically when Mao Zedong came to power in 1949.
Using the death penalty as a political tool, he introduced bloody
punitive campaigns in which suspects were rounded up en masse and
summarily killed. From 1950 to 1953, during the campaign to suppress
counterrevolutionaries, the regime executed more than 710,000
political foes. State-condoned killings spiked again during the
Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and later during the "strike hard"
campaigns initiated under Deng Xiaoping.

Rather than turn away onlookers, Mao encouraged them. Ignoring
the humanitarian threads in Chinese culture, he avowed in 1951 that
executions often "assuage the people's anger." Leaders who followed
him made similar arguments.

Today, executions in China more often stoke anger than quell it.
A 2007-2008 survey of nearly 4,500 people in three provinces funded
by the European Commission found that only 58 percent supported the
death penalty -- compared with nearly 60 percent in the United
States. …

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